WIRED Awake: 10 must-read articles for 29 February

Your WIRED.co.uk daily briefing. Today, Mark Zuckerberg has said that "hate speech has no place on Facebook", Nasa is testing its Martian life detectors in the driest place on Earth, WhatsApp is ending support for older mobile operating systems including BlackBerry 10, and more.

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Speaking in Berlin on Friday, Mark Zuckerberg has said that "hate speech has no place on Facebook and in our community. Until recently in Germany I don’t think we were doing a good enough job, and I think we will continue needing to do a better and better job" (The Guardian). His comments followed a meeting with German chancellor Angela Merkel's chief of staff, which he says has led Facebook to expand its view of "protected groups" to include refugees and migrants

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Losing ARM is a disaster for Huawei. It can't be replaced

Nasa researchers and a team of international scientists have been testing life-detecting instruments built for Mars in the driest place on Earth. Currently based at Yungay Station, a mining ghost town now owned by the University of Antofagasta in Chile, the Atacama Rover Astrobiology Drilling Studies (ARADS) has spent the past month testing equipment designed for Martian exploration, including a Mars-prototype drill, a sample transfer arm and a Signs of Life Detector (SOLID) created by Spain’s Centro de Astrobiologia. Although the Atacama is warmer than Mars, its soil chemistry resembles that of the red planet where, if any trace of life is to be found, it is most likely beneath the surface.

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Facebook-owned cross-platform messaging service WhatsApp has announced that it will end support for several older mobile operating systems by the end of 2016 (ZDNet). The most significant operating systems to be dropped are all iterations of BlackBerry OS, including the latest version 10, following BlackBerry's own move towards Android. Also being discontinued are the Nokia S40 and Symbian S60, Android 2.1 and 2.2 and Windows Phone 7.1 versions of WhatsApp. The company suggests upgrading to a newer phone to continue using its service.

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How to use Trello like a boss

ByWIRED

A US court has given the notorious KaloBios Pharmaceuticals permission to buy the worldwide rights to one of only two drugs used to treat Chagas disease, a neglected but life-threatening parasitic infection that's endemic to parts of South and Central America (Ars Technica). In a scheme devised by discredited former CEO Martin Shkreli, who was fired following his arrest for fraud, the company plans to raise the cost of the drug by as much as 600 percent. It currently costs between $50 and $100 for a course of treatment, and many of Chagas's 300,000 sufferers are poor, making a price increase potentially lethal.

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Drew Bamford, corporate vice president of HTC’s Creative Labs, has said that "it would make sense for us to work on more kinds of VR products, and products that unite our phone business and our VR business in ways that make sense" (TechCrunch). He was speaking at Mobile World Congress, where HTC was showing off its powerful, desktop-oriented Vive virtual reality headset, while rivals Samsung and LG promoted their own mobile VR hardware.

Since its discovery in 2008, the IBEX ribbon, named after the Nasa Interstellar Boundary Explorer satellite that discovered, has been one of the most mysterious objects in our solar system (Motherboard). However, a new study provides a potential explanation for the stream of particles that make up the ribbon lying at the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space: solar blowback. Team lead Eric Zirnstein says that "some solar wind protons are sent flying back towards the sun as neutral atoms after a complex series of charge exchanges, creating the IBEX ribbon."

Google's Android ban puts a stop to Huawei's world domination plan

Facebook's new reactions let you do more than just 'like' a friend's post, but linguists have pointed out that there's something that doesn't fit together about the new emoticons' descriptions: Love, Sad, Angry, Wow, and Haha (WIRED). Social media language specialist Susan Herring says that "it’s a little bit perturbing that they are not the same parts of speech" and says that, unlike traditional emoji, which are purely graphical, "once [Facebook] decide to provide text, they back themselves into a corner, syntactically."

Star Wars director J.J. Abrams has told The Daily Beast that "to me, the fun of Star Wars is the glory of possibility. So it seems insanely narrow-minded and counterintuitive to say that there wouldn’t be a homosexual character in that world." This follows his comments at the US-Ireland Alliance's Oscar Wilde awards, where he said that "when I talk about inclusivity it’s not excluding gay characters. It’s about inclusivity." Fan-shipping favourites, John Boyega’s Finn and Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron, may yet make it as the franchise's first official gay couple.

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Why the UK's lagging behind in the booming electric car revolution

ByWill Bedingfield

It's now twenty years since Pokémon Red and Green were first released in Japan on the Nintendo Game Boy (VentureBeat). Since then, the series has sold over 200 million games and produced hugely popular tie-ins from TV series, films and card games to a near-infinite number of plush Pikachu toys. The games refreshed standard JRPG mechanics with a huge range of capturable, evolving fighting creatures, and the total number of Pokémon in existence is now up to 722.

You can now brush up your HTML and navigate a platform puzzle game at the same time, thanks to Super Markup World, where you help a small blue cube rescue its friend by using HTML code to build platforms and work around obstacles to help it get to the end of each level (TheNextWeb). The game provides coding hints as you go, and makes for an oddly entertaining way of bringing your skills up to date.

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How Monzo, Revolut, Starling and N26 plan to topple legacy banks

BySabrina Weiss

Google is teaching its artificial intelligence how to understand language by making it predict, and replicate, the works of famous dead authors. The company is building systems that are capable of understanding natural language in the same way humans do, with the works of William Shakespeare, Mark Twain and others currently being analysed. "This work has the potential to enrich products through personalisation," Marc Pickett from Google's Natural Language Understanding research group wrote in a recent blog post.

We explore the future of food from the end of meat to closed loop cocktails, edible packaging and egg-free omelettes. Plus we go inside Noma, one of the world's best restaurants, which is leading the way in fermenting and foraging. Out now in print, iPad and iPhone. Subscribe now and save.

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